Couple’s three girls were taken away after reported innocent photos

Lisa Belkin, a former New York Times parenting blogger, wrote of the couple’s case: “The downside of society’s increased awareness that bad things happen to children is an increased tendency to see those bad things everywhere.”

Lisa and A.J. Demaree’s decade-long legal ordeal started with, by all accounts, an utterly innocent family moment.

In 2008, the couple took their three daughters, then infants 5 years, 4 years and 18 months old, on a vacation to San Diego. They snapped more than 100 photos during the trip, like parents do, including several of the girls playing together during bath time. When they returned to their home in Peoria, Arizona, they dropped the camera’s memory stick off at a Walmart for developing.

Within a day, a police detective came knocking.

A Walmart employee had flagged the bath time photos as pornographic, the detective told the parents. One showed the girls wrapped in towels with their arms around each other; another showed their exposed bottoms.